[ On Friday, July 9, 2004 at 21:30:43 (+0200), mouss wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: add less in /rescue
>
> I understand the first part (useful in emergency), but I don't see which 
> parts of unix can be learned from ed. The shell is a more appropriate 
> example for that.

Learning the shell well teaches more about about programming, but
learning 'ed' well teaches some quite fundamental things about
applications and data, as well as practical things about using basic
regular expressions effectively, etc.

> that's unfortunately true. everytime I got stuck, I promiss to learn it, 
> but once things get solved, the promiss get lost after the second boot...

It's too bad /usr/share/doc/usd/09.edtut is empty in NetBSD
distributions....  A half hour reading through that paper, even without
a live computer to work through the examples with, would give you a good
head-start on learning "ed".

(there's no political or legal excuse I can see for this (and other
similar) documents being missing from NetBSD any more -- they've been
freely available for years)

Of course since it is freely avaliable you can find it (or at least its
troff source) elsewhere:

	http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/edtut.bun

Then when you're done with that one the next step is this one:

	http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/vol2/adv.ed.bun

Luckily both papers can be found in the following ready-to-read version:

	http://cm.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol2a.pdf

> Why not have a lib of useful shell functions in the dist?

I don't know -- that's certainly what I would (should!) do!  ;-)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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